Three Articles You Need To Read About Three-Sided Marketplaces

What Is A Three-Sided Marketplace?

Marketplace is a term that has been going around for a while now, but what is it exactly? Think of some of the brand new companies that popped up into relevance this decade: Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, DoorDash. What do they all have in common? Besides the fact that they all are tech-centric, they also are marketplaces.

Marketplaces are all about connecting vendors to customers, guided by a curated experience brought by the marketplace owner (in this case, any of the companies mentioned before). Unlike a traditional business, the marketplace owners do not own any of the vendors, but instead focus on bringing both parties involved the best possible experience.

Three-Sided Marketplaces bring a new actor into play, who will receive a monetary compensation for completing the experience between the customer and the vendor. Traditional marketplaces have lots of possible business optimizations, and if they are three-sided then we gain even more interactions to optimize!

For today’s insights recommendation post, we gathered a selection of three reading materials that will help you understand some basic concepts of the three-sided marketplace and the role machine learning plays in them.

#1: Improving The Three Sided Marketplace With Machine Learning

From our very own blog, this post covers some of the following topics through the use of real-life business examples:

• What is a three-sided marketplace?
• How can machine learning help businesses through different techniques such as: demand forecasting, supply and demand optimization, preparation and time prediction, customer personalization, uplift modelling and fraud detection.

#2: Using ML and Optimization to Solve DoorDash’s Dispatch Problem

The goal of dispatch at DoorDash is to find the right Dasher to deliver each order from merchant to customer. Dispatch decisions influence customer and merchant experience as well as marketplace efficiency.

Read on to find out what role machine learning plays in different moments of their order’s journey. The real-life use case is an interesting way to visualise the real impact ML can have on a three-sided marketplace.

#3: Data, Machine Learning, and Marketplace Optimization at Upwork

This post takes a deep dive into the problems the company has faced implementing a Multi-Sided Marketplace, and the technologies and architecture they've used to solve them. It is an interesting case on how machine learning can be used to leverage valuable marketplace data in different phases of the customer conversion funnel.

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